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People search results returns sps3:// instead of http://

Talking about odd behaviors or things that one can configure and have unexpected results in SharePoint, here’s one:

You search for People Names. All looks fine, the names are returned, all looks ok, BUT when you click on the URL that should take you to that person’s public profile, you receive a “Page cannot be displayed” Error.

Investigating the URL , you discover that the url does not seem like what it is supposed to be as you remember the URLs…

Instead of http://site/… you have sps3://site/site$$$People/…

This can’t be good, you say, and start looking into it.

Well, to save you some trouble of digging into protocol handlers and IFilters, looking for all sorts of pointers and hints and tips , here’s the silver bullet:

Go to User Profiles and properties under your SSP, open the properties and make sure the ID property’s “Indexed” setting is set to on.

The crawler builds the user profile URL based on this ID ( like http://mysitehost/person.aspx?guid=GUID) if the GUID is not available in crawl time, the URL is not built and the server falls back to the start point of the content source, which is sps3://…

If the silver doesn’t do it, you can consider start digging for gold ….( protocol handlers, IFilters, errors, exceptions in ULS logs etc.)